"It is important not to get too hung up on judging a teacher or a center by appearance. It was my experience to go first to very strict and well-disciplined aesthetic monastery. The teacher Achaan Chaa was a very precise, proper, and exquisite example of a monk living a very simple life. Then I went to a Burmese Temple with a very different sort of teacher. At the Burmese Temple I found a very famous meditation teacher who had had ten thousand disciples before me; yet when I saw him he appeared sloppy, his robe dragged on the ground, he smoked Burmese cigars, and he spent much of his days sitting around talking with the women in the temple in a very un-monkish way, unlike my former teacher. Sometimes he appeared to get angry and to be concerned with petty things. For the first two months of my intensive practice there I suffered a great deal making comparisons between these two teachers. The Burmese teacher was kind to me and gave me one of the nicest meditation cottages right near his own. As a result every day I would see him sitting around smoking cigars and talking with the ladies. It upset my practice terribly. I would think to myself, 'What am I doing learning from this man? I'm working so hard in meditating and he's out there like that, he doesn't have anything to teach me. Why doesn't he behave like a monk the way Achaan Chaa did?' It took me a couple of months to realize that his outward form did not detract from the value I was getting from the meditation. And that to judge and compare outward form, to look for the Buddha in the teacher, was simply creating more suffering for myself. The mind that judges creates suffering. Finally, when I was able to let go, I was able to benefit greatly from his instruction and teaching, and he was a very good teacher of this meditation technique. (And what wasn't useful, I left for him.) It took a lot of suffering to come to understand how the discriminating mind creates difficulties; but seeing, I was able to let go."